Past and Present: The Hotel Granada

A Look at Brooklyn, then and now.

Few people parking in the lot near BAM realize what kind of building stood where the lot is now, and unless you grew up in Brooklyn, or lived here in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, you may not remember the Hotel Granada, which stood at this site. Perhaps you remember its other name: the notorious Brooklyn Arms Hotel?

The Hotel Granada had a grand beginning, opening in 1927 as one of Downtown Brooklyn’s finer venues, home to its luxurious Forsythia Room, the site of many wedding receptions, Bar Mitzvah’s and other social events. The Granada was used to house visiting ball players when the Dodgers were playing home games. Up until the 1960’s, the hotel retained a grand sort of faded elegance, and in addition to now being a middle class kind of hotel, was home to a number of Pratt students who were billeted there, as part of the Institute’s dorm system.

But by the 1970’s, attempts to convert the building to Pratt student housing had fallen through, the hotel become a seedy welfare SRO, and it went downhill from there. By the 1980’s, the city of New York had gotten the genius idea to house homeless families in hotels, paying hotel owners Waldorf Astoria prices for worse than Bowery flophouses. It was one of the disgraces of the decade. There were about 60 of these hotels across the city, and the Granada, now called the Brooklyn Arms Hotel, was one of the largest and the worst. Without any inspections, or even guarantees of a modicum of decent living conditions, the city began housing homeless singles and families, most displaced by fires or joblessness, in the rat and insect infested, dangerous, no heat, no water, no elevator, rooms. Entire families were often put in single rooms, drug dealing and prostitution were rampant, and people were getting injured from everything, especially the lack of maintenance in the building.

Today, it just boggles the mind that this was allowed to happen as long as it did. Remember, these were rooms and apartments that the city was paying some owners up to $3,000 a week, per unit, to rent. The owners just pocketed the money and did nothing. By the time it closed, The Brooklyn Arms had 268 families in the units, rolling in millions to the owners. Talk about waste in city government. A tragic fire in 1986 killed four children in one family, and sent many other people to the hospital. After television and newspaper investigations, and hearings and reports of horrors beyond most people’s imaginings, the city began moving people out. In 1989, the last people were moved out of the Brooklyn Arms Hotel, and in 1994, the hotel was quickly torn down and turned into a parking lot. It was as if the city was trying to erase all trace of the horrors, greed and mismanagement. And they did. GMAP